by Philip Carlo
More than anything else, Pitera’s association with the Bonannos caught and held their interest in a huge way. This could very well be the chink in the armor of the Bonanno family that they, the DEA, had been looking for; this might very well bring down the whole family if they could get the goods on Pitera; if they could turn Pitera and make him spill the beans…tell all he knew. It stood to reason that if Bonanno underlings were selling drugs, everyone in the family from the boss on down not only knew about it but had given their blessings, their advice, their protection. In other words, it was not two or ten or several dozen members of the Bonanno crime family hustling drugs. What was happening here, the reality of what was going on, was that the whole family was a well-lubricated machine whose by-product was a huge amount of heroin and cocaine. Jim and Tom well knew that the pipeline that Carmine Galante had constructed at the behest of Joseph Bonanno in the 1950s was still running.
They met Angelo in the basement of his house on West Eighth Street. It was unkempt, dirty—a mess. It didn’t take long for Judy Haimowitz to show up. She was short and overweight and had a full head of hair that went every which way at once. Angelo introduced her to the agents. She was nervous. It was immediately apparent to Jim and Tom that she was not a professional, hardcore dealer as such, that, more than likely, she was somebody who got caught up in drugs because of her abuse of drugs, the world of drugs…the milieu of drug abuse. Without speaking to one another, Jim and Tom knew that their job would be to relax her and set her up, use her to get bigger fish. They sat down. Pleasantries were exchanged.
“I’ve got the stuff,” Judy offered before going to her pocketbook. She riffled through her bag, and as she fumbled for the heroin, a gun suddenly fell out of her pocketbook. The gun hit the ground. It was a .25 automatic. Tommy and Jim and Angelo looked at one another. This was more comical than dangerous, the agents thought.
“Oh, I’m so sorry!” Judy said before picking up the auto and putting it back in her bag.
“Don’t worry,” Angelo put in. “She’s good people. Frank Gangi is her boyfriend. Real stand-up guy.”
Glad the gun was away, they all laughed somewhat nervously. Judy handed the heroin to Jim. He looked at it with great intensity, as though he was an expert geologist studying an uncut diamond.
“Looks real good,” he said. Judy Haimowitz was paid. Though she was a small player in a life-and-death game, because of Agents Hunt and Geisel, she would, ultimately, play a significant role in the story of Tommy Pitera.
They now discussed Jim and Tommy meeting Pitera; it was Pitera they wanted. Angelo explained to them that Pitera was paranoid, suspicious, very wary of meeting strangers. He was very fond of saying—Angelo said—“If I don’t know the cunt they came out of, I don’t want to know them.” Still, Angelo said, he’d do what he could to set up a meeting between Pitera and Jim and Tom.
The deed done, Jim and Tommy made for the sidewalk, walking along a driveway that separated Angelo’s place from the house next door. It was quiet, the night clear, stars shining in the black sky. The smell of Italian cooking, tomato sauce and basil and garlic, wafted seductively through the air. As they reached the sidewalk, they ran into a tall, dark-haired, attractive woman.
“Is Judy inside?” she asked the agents.
“Yeah, she is,” Jim said.
She thanked them, smiled, and walked toward the house. She had, Jim was sure, a Canadian accent.
One way or another, Jim and Tom thought, they would manage to get the goods on Pitera—if possible, get him holding drugs. At that point, they had no idea just how cagey and cunning, treacherous Pitera was. They headed back to DEA headquarters, where they handed in the dope they had bought, which would be tested for content and purity. As it happened, it was particularly good heroin, with a 20 percent cut on it.
They already had Judy Haimowitz. She had sold them both drugs. They had each seen her carrying a gun. However, rather than bust her now, they would diligently and slowly work her.
The game was afoot.
Later that evening, Judy Haimowitz went to the Just Us Bar, where she found Frank Gangi. Gangi was a tall, thin, muscular man with particularly broad shoulders. His hair was thick and jet-black. Judy told him about the sale and the two guys from the Bronx she met. She then told Gangi that Angelo had used his name, said his name to these two guys—that he, Gangi, was a stand-up guy.
This was bad form, Gangi knew. You don’t go throwing around people’s names. He immediately called Angelo and told him to come to the bar. When Angelo arrived there, Gangi berated him for using his name and suddenly gave him a hard smack across the face.
“Don’t ever fucking use my fucking name, you understand, you little fuck?”
Angelo was not only hurt by the slap but angered and incensed and embarrassed. He was soon heard telling people that he was going to go get a bat and break Frank Gangi’s head open. Angelo Favara was all about bluster and hot air; he was not a tough guy. He was a drug abuser who got caught up in the world of drugs. They, Jim and Tom, would use him, make him a stepping-stone.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
SURVEILLANCE
It didn’t take long for Jim and Tommy Geisel to again cop from Judy Haimowitz. Angelo was with them. Angelo, again, could not set up a meeting with Pitera. Still, Jim and Tommy felt that what they were doing was now slowly and methodically building a case that would ultimately end in the arrest of not only Pitera but the people he worked with, his minions, and the people he worked for, his bosses. This time Judy Haimowitz was more relaxed. She readily handed over the drugs. She asked them if they’d like to do a toot. They declined. Here, now, was a very slippery road. Dealers liked to see their customers get high in front of them. Cops, for the most part, would not use drugs. Jim and Tommy had been in this position before. They had a pat answer, viable and ready.
“We got serious business later and can’t party right now,” Jim said.
“Okay, next time,” Judy said.
With that, Jim and Angelo and Tommy were soon back outside. Angelo promised he would arrange for them to meet Tommy. He seemed sincere, though his words did not ring true to the seasoned agents.
Jim and Tommy and backup agents from Group 33 began surveillance of Tommy Karate Pitera’s bar, the Just Us Bar. They quickly noticed that it wasn’t a crowded, loud place. It was a quiet neighborhood bar on a residential street in the heart of Gravesend, Brooklyn, more like a social club than a public bar. Curious, wanting to know themselves what was going on inside the Just Us Bar, Jim and Tom made it their business to learn as much about the bar and Tommy Pitera as possible.
What Pitera had done, somewhat comically—when a civilian came into the bar—was charge exorbitant prices for a drink or beer. Pitera really meant this place was just for them, thus his calling the bar the Just Us. What the bar was all about was creating a hangout for Pitera and his crew, his customer base—anybody in La Cosa Nostra. It was the squares, the “civvies” as they called them, they wanted to keep out. The patrons who did enter the bar were rough and talked like they were right out of central casting for a mob movie.
Interestingly, it wasn’t only men who hung out there. So-called guidos—Cadillac-driving, pinkie-ring-and-gold-chain-with-medallion-wearing, blow-dryer-using, Sergio Tacchini sweatsuit-clad men—hung out here. But there were also women who came into the bar, women who belonged, women who were part of the culture of Bensonhurst and Gravesend—guidettes. These women spoke the same vernacular as the men. For them, made men were very appealing. They had money and were oversexed. The women unapologetically teased their hair and wore five-inch heels with pants so tight it looked as though the seams would burst at any moment. Their makeup was overt and in-your-face, their eyeliner caked on, their lip liner mismatched to their lipstick. Their nails were fake, airbrushed, and ridiculously long. For these women to date or even marry a made man, a lieutenant, a captain, was a goal in life. No matter how you cut it, mob guys, mafiosi, had money to burn. One of the places th
ey most liked to spend money was on women, lavishly and without reservation.
As Jim and Tommy observed the bar, learned about its rhythm and pace, they saw these women, heard them talk, and were…amused. They appreciated them for who they were. They didn’t necessarily judge them or make fun of them, but they thought they were comical and harmless, which, for the most part, was true. However, tragedy, sudden and amazingly violent, could strike these women at any time. By becoming involved with mafiosi, they were entering a world where, at a moment’s notice, they, their boyfriend, or husband could be murdered.
Murder was as intricate a part of that life as silk socks and diamond pinkie rings. If any woman was in the wrong place at the wrong time, she could get killed. If she did something excessively disrespectful, she could get killed. For the most part, the mob did not kill women. But still, when tempers flared and bullets flew, anyone could die.
One weekday evening, while Jim and Tom observed from a car across the street, Pitera walked into the bar. Jim and Tommy had seen photos of him and he was very easy to discern. His face was white like chalk, stern and stoic. He had receding straight black hair. Even in the dim light of Avenue S, they could see his eyes, a piercing blue. They stood out on his face like headlights. It was obvious he was an athletic man, wide-shouldered and muscular, well coordinated and comfortable in his own skin.
Tommy and Jim viewed Pitera only as part of something larger. It was the something larger they were after: not only the heads of the Bonanno crime family but the other heads as well. They knew, for instance, that many of the captains in the Gambino family were moving drugs. They knew, too, that John Gotti’s brother Gene was a drug dealer. They knew that Gambino captain Eddie Lino was a drug dealer. They knew that they all worked together, hand in hand, that they were all part of a large, tightly woven cabal. What Tom and Jim were after, the reason they were sitting there, was to gather irrefutable evidence that would hold up in a court of law, against the blistering scrutiny of mean-spirited defense attorneys.
They, Jim and Tom, were consummate professionals. They were not in a hurry. They would put in as much time as necessary, unlike the case in most law enforcement outfits, where everyone was in a hurry, everyone was looking for headlines, everyone was looking for the positive publicity that goes along with a big bust. Crime fighting was political. The more accolades any given agency received, the more funding they were given, the more respect they received. The DEA, however, was more about working cases patiently and professionally until they came to true fruition. Not only did this work well as a matter of policy, but when they did move, when they did make arrests, the arrests stuck. Bad guys went to jail. That’s what they were after, getting bad guys off the street once and for all.
Both Jim and Tommy could sense in their bones that something substantial was happening here. Yet, still, they had no idea just how diabolical and dangerous and what a menace Tommy Pitera really was.
Pitera and a few other men exited the bar and hung out in front of it. They smoked cigarettes, talked quietly among themselves. At one point, Pitera seemed to stare across the street, stare at the Cadillac in which Jim and Tommy were sitting. It was as though he knew cops were in the car, though he did not know if it was the FBI, NYPD Organized Crime Unit, or the DEA. Whoever they were, he wanted to defy them, treat them as though he knew who they were and why they were there, and almost dare them to do something.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
PHYLLIS
Tommy Pitera was married to his childhood sweetheart, Carol Boguski. Carol was somewhat typical of a Bensonhurst/Gravesend girl. She had the walk, talk, dress. When Tommy first met her, he was a far different person than he was now. As often happens with couples, one of the pair, for a host of reasons, outgrows the other. Tommy considered himself now more sophisticated, worldly, a man of respect. He had a child with Carol—Charles. Though Tommy and Carol were not living together anymore, did not see each other much, Tommy did everything he should for her and his son—provided what they needed in every way he could. He paid their rent, bought clothes, food, whatever else they needed. Generally speaking, Tommy showed tremendous deference toward women.
Now it was the mid-eighties, and he was deeply involved with a Brooklyn girl named Celeste LiPari. Celeste was attractive. She had a triangular-shaped face, pronounced cheekbones, a narrow, delicate chin and a high, broad forehead. She had large dark eyes, full lips, a perfect figure—small waist, curved hips, full breasts. As attractive as she was, Celeste sounded like a rough, tough truck driver when she talked. She, perhaps more than even Tommy, wanted to be a gangster, comported herself like a gangster. Her Brooklyn accent was excessive. She talked out of the side of her pretty mouth.
For Tommy Pitera, Celeste was perfect. He worshipped the ground she walked on. Everything about her was right for him except one thing: her drug use. She was not an occasional, weekend user. She was one of those people who had “an addictive personality” and she regularly used both cocaine and heroin. It got so that the two of them fought over her drug abuse. He swore he would leave her; she promised she’d stop. It went on like this for month after month. Now he was getting fed up; now he was getting desperate. The difficulty for him was that he loved the woman and that was a big problem. It went beyond their relationship. He was a bona fide member of the Bonanno family. Having a girl like her, going around and snorting cocaine and partying, undermined his credibility as a man. If you can’t control your woman, you can’t control your business.
He sat her down. He looked her in the eyes and explained the situation. He grabbed her by the shoulders and implored her to stop. She promised she would. The next week it would be the same thing. Unless she towed the line, he was afraid that sooner or later this could end in tragedy. He was careful to keep his business away from her, but she knew things about what he did, about who he was, and she was becoming a liability.
He came to realize that one of the problems was—Phyllis Burdi.
Phyllis was a Brooklyn girl, raised on its mean streets, and she, too, was a drug abuser who, like Celeste, used cocaine and heroin excessively. Phyllis came from a family of five who lived on Bay Thirty-fifth Street in Bensonhurst. They were a large, loud clan and most people on the block shunned them. Phyllis, by far, was the prettiest one. Like Celeste, she was strikingly attractive. She looked very much like a young Cindy Crawford, though a Cindy Crawford who had been up for a couple of nights on a drug binge. There were circles under her eyes, her skin was mealy, and her hair, for the most part, looked like she had just crawled out of bed. The most striking feature Phyllis had was her smile. It was a particularly beautiful smile that went from ear to ear and exposed large, square white teeth. Her lower lip was full and curved into a natural pout. Phyllis had an abundance of street smarts and knew her way around Brooklyn as well as she knew her way around her small, dingy one-bedroom apartment on West Fifth Street. Some say that Phyllis was a prostitute, that she sold her sex for clothes and for money and for drugs. There are people who say she prostituted herself on Coney Island when on a drug binge—a place where the disenfranchised of society go to party, for sex and drugs. Here, the blue collar let their hair down.
Phyllis was not a prostitute. What she was about was doing what needed to be done to make ends meet, whatever it was. She liked wiseguys and wiseguys liked her right back. She had relationships, intimate, intense sexual relationships, with a long list of important mafiosi. One of her lovers was none other than Eddie Lino, the feared Gambino war captain—cousin of Frankie Lino, Tommy Pitera’s boss.
It was no secret that Eddie Lino was deeply immersed in drugs. Phyllis told people that he gave her whatever she wanted, ounces at a time. Eddie Lino was only one of a dozen seriously connected men with whom Phyllis was having sex. She was that attractive. When goodfellas were around Phyllis, it was like bees around spring flowers. When she was dressed and well put together, she looked like a striking model who had just stepped off the pages of the latest Vogue. Everything about
her worked. Her small, perfectly round breasts, the perfect bubble that was her derriere.
It didn’t take long for Tommy Pitera to learn that Phyllis was providing drugs to his beloved Celeste. When he first heard this, he knew he had to be careful. He was aware that Phyllis knew a lot of powerful men; he, like everyone else, knew she was having an affair with Eddie Lino. Eddie Lino and Pitera were close. Pitera knew that if he went to Eddie and asked for his help in this matter, he’d get it, but it was a very delicate situation. This was about Pitera keeping his own house clean. He didn’t want to hang his dirty laundry out for public consumption. Plus he had endless respect for Eddie Lino. He viewed Eddie as the dark prince of dark princes. He aspired to be like Eddie.
Taking that into consideration, Pitera wondered how he could go to Eddie and ask for his help in this matter. He would, he decided, be diplomatic. Pitera looked for Phyllis for several days and then finally ran into her at an after-hours club. By now, all throughout Mafiadom, Pitera was known as a killer; it was rumored that he was butchering people, cutting them up after murdering them. He was notorious in the world of the notorious. Though Phyllis knew she had friends in high places, she also knew she had to take Pitera very seriously.
He took her outside, and leaning against a red-brick wall, speaking in his high-pitched voice, he said, “Phyllis, I have a problem and I need your help. Celeste is out of control. I don’t want her using drugs. But I—listen to me—I’m not blaming you for anything; I’m not saying you did anything. What I’m saying is that she can’t control herself and I’d really appreciate it if you made sure not to give her any drugs—ever. She has a couple of toots, she starts drinking, and next she’s using heroin. I’d really appreciate this.”
